[Blindmath] problems reading PDF scientific documents
John Gardner
john.gardner at orst.edu
Wed Jun 6 16:05:48 UTC 2012
Infty Reader is much more successful when used to read books and papers in
traditional scientific form than with much modern educational literature.
Many textbooks in the US now look more like cartoon books than traditional
science. Infty Reader largely gives garbage with such books.
If you use Infty Reader to read books and papers that have well-organized
text and equations that flow down the page, it works pretty well. PDF input
is generally better than giving it scanned images unless you are extremely
careful to scan following their directions.
Hope this is helpful.
-----Original Message-----
From: blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Michael Whapples
Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2012 3:28 AM
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
Subject: Re: [Blindmath] problems reading PDF scientific documents
I personally have not used infty reader, however I have heard from some
people that they have found it useful. One such person is John Miller, who I
think is more likely to be found on the NFB-science list he may be on this
one. I have also met people here in the UK who have used it and said they
had some good results.
However infty reader is an optical character recognition (OCR) package, so
it isn't guaranteed to get everything 100% correct and quality of results is
highly dependent on the quality of the original document. I think OCR is the
only way currently PDF will be made accessible for maths, even the maxtract
project I mentioned said that they cannot get all the information they need
by parsing the PDF document. I believe there may be some work on including
maths in a PDF in an accessible form, however that probably is years away
from completion and will require the PDF to be created in the correct way so
won't work for current PDF documents.
As for converting Word documents to LaTeX, its not something I have really
done. I do know there is software out there but I haven't tried any.
Normally if I have needed to read maths in a Word document I have used
MathType from design science, which can either put the document out to HTML
with MathML which can be viewed in internet explorer with math player and a
screen reader, or you can get it to toggle the equations within the word
document to be in LaTeX notation (the rest of the document is still normal
word stuff, the equations are the only thing in LaTeX notation).
As for the price of MathType, may be your college/university has a license
for it which you could use, if not the student license of MathType isn't too
bad on price.
Also while on accessibility of Word and maths, I believe Design science have
created some software to allow word documents with maths to be exported as
daisy books. I don't know what cost on this is like or how well it works as
I haven't used it. Obviously you would also need a daisy reader which is
capable of maths content (I believe GH-player and Dolphin's daisy reader
both can do this, there may be others).
Michael Whapples
On 6 Jun 2012, at 00:06, Géssica Michelle dos Santos Pereira wrote:
> Thanks for your advice
>
> Michael,
>
> Do you think the infty reader really works? I've tried the trial
> version, but the result is so strange... it means there are characters
> left. Is there anything that I have to do before processing the pdf
> documentt? I've got another proble now.It only recognizes the
> alfanumerics characters and not the Maths characters, I don't know
> why, but the out file is a "pdf2txt" instead of "txt.
> Could you also tell me how you do to convert Word format to LaTeX too?
> I've tried the Grindeq, but I think it doesn't recognize all the
> document.
> Thank you for the clue on the new software , I will be watching.
>
> ***
>
> Lucas,
>
> Exactly! I'm from Curitiba! =)
> In the graduation phase the teachers translated the documents for me,
> some thing like this: an integral became I [i, j] f(x) dx...
> But now I'm taking the master degree, there are lots of materials to
> read, we can't keep translating like that.
> And take this: what to do when the teacher doesn't know LaTex?
> Of course, let's keep talking!
>
> ***
>
> José,
>
> I've seen other softwares in the same line, I mean, softwares to edit
> LaTeX documents... but how to solve the reading problem?
>
> ***
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Géssica Michelle
>
>
>
>
> 2012/6/1, Michael Whapples <mwhapples at aim.com>:
>> Hello,
>> Further to that last message, one of the projects I am aware of which
>> is working on the problem of accessing maths in PDF is maxtract and
>> the blog for it can be found at
>> http://researchblogs.cs.bham.ac.uk/math-access/category/maxtract/
>>
>> This is work in progress and I don't know when they plan to have
>> something usable out.
>>
>> Michael Whapples
>> On 31/05/2012 10:36, Michael Whapples wrote:
>>> On 31/05/2012 01:26, Lucas Radaelli wrote:
>>>> Hey Jessica,
>>>>
>>>> If you are from Curitiba we are from the same city! :)
>>>>
>>>> I have got a lot of problems in this area too. Specially in Brazil
>>>> where it seems that nobody understands about that to give us a hand.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> What my teachers have done during graduation was create the
>>>> scientific documents already in LaTeX, and they offered the normal
>>>> pdf to other students. The program that michael mentioned I have
>>>> never used yet, but gonna check it out. I did not oppenned the
>>>> website yet, but I am almost sure that it is more than 500 dolars... I
hope that I am wrong!
>>>>
>>>> You can send me a mail too, we can keep in contact to finde
>>>> solutions together here in Brazil.
>>>>
>>>> Greetings!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> 2012/5/30, Michael Whapples<mwhapples at aim.com>:
>>>>> The infty reader www.inftyproject.org may help. I understand other
>>>>> things are being developed but this the only working solution for
>>>>> now.
>>>>>
>>>>> Michael Whapples
>>>>>
>>>>> Sent from my iPod
>>>>>
>>>>> On 30 May 2012, at 22:24, Géssica Michelle dos Santos
>>>>> Pereira<gessicamichelle at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Dear all,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I am Gessica, from the south of Brazil, with visual impairment,
>>>>>> having difficulties in reading PDF scientific documents, when
>>>>>> they show formulae.. I use screen reader Jaws and I've heard that
>>>>>> LaTeX or MathML might be useful but would you know how to convert
>>>>>> the PDF documents into these formats? .....moreover...how to use
>>>>>> them? I wonder if you could help me find the solution.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Best regards,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Gessica Michelle
>>>>>>
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>>> Yes, unfortunately the infty reader software is expensive. It is
>>> worth noting though that infty reader is OCR software for maths, so
>>> could put printed maths from paper into an electronic format such as
>>> LaTeX or MathML as well.
>>>
>>> Hopefully one of the other projects I know of will allow access to
>>> PDF at a lower cost.
>>>
>>> In many cases the PDF is created from another format such as LaTeX
>>> so it might be worth contacting the author to see if they can
>>> provide the document in another format.
>>>
>>> Michael Whapples
>>>
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>>
>>
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